Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Two Dreams

By Don Schaeffer

The kids gathered in Caroline's family living room
for snacks. They lolled around on the rug and chairs. The girls
challenged the boys to leg wrestling contests. It was chilly out in
the late autumn. There were no leaves on the trees. But the room was
warm. It was soaked in joy. It was taken for granted. All who were
there, Kathy and Neil, Caroline and Nolan and Pete and unrecognized
others invited didn't care about the climate.

When David arrived it was an accident. He rang the
bell in ignorance. Caroline answered politely, greeting him. She
didn't ask for his invitation.

Neil saw David enter and everyone heard him say, “Oh
no.” This was the end of their joy. They all felt the cold from the
inside of David's half visible body.

David never took it for granted. It was not granted.
Not taking it for granted was David’s transgression.

When Moshe awoke from this dream the world around his
bed shimmered in late summer moonlight. Ceres was not in his bed. He
was in the guest room bed. He came to that awareness. Moshe had mixed
feelings about sleeping alone. Maybe those feelings triggered the
dream, maybe recollection.

He couldn't remember how he ended up where he was,
tabulated into a household unit, counted along with the true
residents of New York. He lived then among the creatures with raised
eyes and straight determined walks. Then he met Ceres, a woman not a
fantasy and lived as the estranged visions washed away in the years.
But he was still only half visible because he couldn't take it for
granted. He cooperated in the reality of the town and the country and
the world but with obvious reluctance. Since he didn't do so with a
whole heart, the world never fully paid him.

Not speaking up, not saying hello, slipping half-seen
in and out of shops and down streets, not knowing how to make his
voice call up his visibility. He walked among those who chatter,
those in fashion, those with noses pointed straight ahead, with human
faces so completely recognizable as to declare themselves universal,
flesh solid, uniquely real. They all took this for granted. Moshe did
so with reservations. The slight hesitation in his mind, in his
fingers, although not really articulate-able, was noticed. Moshe was
the ghost of the town. Its walls were hollow, not quite owned by him.

It took Moshe ten years of graduate school to earn his
Ph.D. He thought it exceptional considering his poor memory for
names.

Moshe dreamed.

He was in an experimental hospital ward. He and the
other patients spent the days sitting at tables and watching TV
surrounded by pristine white walls and curtains and wearing hospital
gowns. It was a grand social event and Moshe never had enjoyed such a
sense of belonging. One of the assistants was an attractive young
woman named Linda, like the kind of young woman with whom Moshe would
flirt when he was a graduate student.

The ward was designed to test a novel approach to
producing food using a substance never used before and subject to
universal human taboo. At first he refused to accept it, telling
Linda that the thought of it made him sick. Linda persisted, moving
near him in his hospital gown and describing how nicely they prepared
the dish. He vacillated, closing and opening his fleshy mouth until
finally yielding to Linda's persuasion. She was jubilant and rose to
arrange his meal.

Moshe awoke suddenly before the sandwich was
delivered.

The key was Moshe’s culpability. Ceres pointed out
that his career was marred by personality flaws that opened him to
fraud. Some of the mistakes of the past never got erased. The
disappointment generated by them weakened the private social fabric
of Moshe’s quiet, withdrawn life. He never felt like a hero in his
own house.

The job of Moshe's wife was to prevent undue
self-esteem. Moshe had thought that ending his isolation in the
permanent company of a woman would flatter him. It turned out not to
be true. It was the same as his belief that he would be the master of
his house. Ceres couldn't help it. It was a natural reaction against
moral weakness, to spread shame.

Moshe worked as a TSR. Telephone sales representative
was his profession. Not what he planned and worked for. Failure was
frightening and refreshing as he came down.

At Re-Tel Corporation International selling telephone
donations for minor charities that needed that kind of help he was
part of a troop of telephone headset wearers, long evening hours bent
over a monitor that spit his script out at him as well as bits of
history. Selling was frightening, a flow of human voices giving and
not giving, under the hot light of chance. Moshe always thought that
chance was the language of God. He tried to measure his regeneracy by
his sales, a gambler's preoccupation, watching waves of numbers on
display, flowing through the hours and minutes, envy and
embarrassment.

Moshe sold for half-legitimate mortgage banks, credit
card companies, low legitimacy financial schemes, absurd mail order
offers with hidden clauses that had to be read quickly. He sold
memberships and subscriptions, contract deals. Ten years of pretense
fell to earth and ten years of raw labor of the heart.

Legally, the shift had to end by 9. It was completely
night and the late autumn had shifted into cold as the would-be,
might-have-been Moshe made his way to the glass bus shelter. He did
feel like a citizen tonight, one among many. Those in the shelter,
slightly hand-me-down and raw, everyday human products shared a metal
bench or stood against the glass looking for buses. The wind managed
to get under the plate glass and made him shiver, a mild form of fear
because of the shadows around him.

Moshe always saw himself as young, the youngest and most
helpless in the room, even with his bald head, his graying sideburns
and his old man beard. Apparent seniority and sophistication hid him
and he rode around in his face and body like rajah in a tent atop an
elephant.

On
Wednesday evening when Moshe had off, while he waited for the fright
of his next shift, he and Ceres went to the nearby casino. They had
dinner in the plastic cafeteria, fitted to look like Acapulco, which
he would never see in reality. They kept their expenses for gambling
down to ten dollars. Each of them sat at a 25 cent slot and watched
the flow of spinning fruit and diamonds. Here was Moshe’s hall of
prayer. The slot machine was his prayer wheel, the word of God
suspended in time directly viewable in wins and losses. He saw the
hills and valleys of the hidden holy world.